Ever Deepening

The Polis

While the age of science has cast a shadow over the accomplishments of
the ancient Greeks, their records reflect an apparently unique social
circumstance. The society of pre-Hellenic Greece underwent the
consolidation of towns into cities in a culture that was sophisticated
enough to manage the process, and literate enough to document it.
Furthermore, the temperateness and fertility of the Greek ecology allowed
time for leaders and citizens alike to invest in personal excellence,
rather than remaining focused narrowly on day-to-day survival.

The Greeks were intensely aware of the need to match social structures
to the character of a people. The leaders of the city-states argued
political philosophy with the conviction of people who could imagine no
other way to live. In fact, they probably could not. The character of the
Spartan (Athenian, Thebe) was functional only within the Spartan
(Athenian, Theban) milieu. Unfortunately, the argument of their
convictions was often taken to the battlefield. Ultimately, it was their
inability to harmonize their politics in a larger association that led the
experiment away from Greece into foreign hands. The transfer of the
liberalizing impetus of Greek politics though the foremost student of
Aristotle, Alexander of Macedon, is a fascinating story.

The vitality of the struggles between the Greek city-states reflected
the power of social coherency manifested in the polis. The Greeks
recognized the spiritual aspect of that coherency. It was a technology
used on the battlefield, and pursued by a political elite that eventually
descended to despotism. The failure of the Greeks was their inability to
factor their diverse experience as insights that led to evolution of
robust and flexible systems for political change. Those systems were
developed relatively recently in the modern democracies. In ancient
Greece, conversely, the only effective check on privilege was the personal
nobility of the elite.

The Greeks did make forays in this regard. The cultural leaders
attempted to simplify the religious pantheon, emphasizing the deities as
guiding spirits rather than as avatars of human potential - and caprice.
Plato documented the attempts of Socrates to moderate the ignoble or
misguided impulses of the political elite, and Aristotle carried that work
forward.

Socrates observed that the polis appeared to lose its coherency
when the population of a city surpassed 100,000, and perhaps that explains
the descent of the Greek city-states into tyranny. Throughout the 19th and
20th centuries, Western cultures struggled with the attempt to break up
cultural cliques to create more homogeneous and egalitarian societies.
Unfortunately, the mechanism of change has often been martial force or
punitive legislation that forced concessions from the privileged. While
arguably necessary, this has had the side-effect of disrupting social
consensus while creating logistical barriers to its evolution. Socrates'
rule of 100,000 may figure in those difficulties: if coherency cannot be
sustained, a reasonable response is the application of ethics to control
social evolution.

The beginning of the 21st century has seen a counteraction in America.
Sub-cultures are re-segregating, perhaps in an intuitive attempt to
re-establish coherency. The goal of the over-arching political elite must
be to recognize greatness in each sub-culture, and to facilitate
association between leaders, particularly where ties would be mutually
beneficial. Conscious facilitation of the dynamic of love between
sub-cultures is the way out of the snare of the Ancient Greeks.